Those Weary Citation Blues

So, the Modern Language Association has just come out with a brand new edition. It's as if they thought, "Hey! We know our citation style is fine but, just for shoots and gaggles, let's have it marry APA and produce the ugliest baby possible." What followed is an abomination of nature/citation. In short, they're moving away from a prescriptive, rules-based citation style (because rules are repressive formalist thinking, a la Strunk & White) to a citation style that emphasizes the "rhetorical situation" of citation.  Basically, you have to have all the major elements (title, author, etc) in a set order, but everything else is apparently up to the citer. Which is all fine and well for practicing academics who already know the principles of citation, but try explaining this to freshman. It'll be a nightmare.

Anyway, here's an example of the ugliness. Actually, the new citation method for monographs isn't all that bad. We go from


  • Jacobs, Alan. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.


to


  • Jacobs, Alan. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Oxford UP, 2011.


I can actually live with that, once I get used to it. The citation for articles, however, is where bibliographic putrescence regurgitates itself upon the stage:

  • Kinkaid, Jamaica. “In History.” Callaloo 24.2 (Spring 2001): 620-26. Web.


That beautiful, stream-lined style has now been whacked by the APA ugly-stick**:

  • Kincaid, Jamaica. “In History.” Callaloo, vol. 24, no. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 620-26.


Say whuh? The above combines all the virtues of a run-on sentence with the helpfulness of tedious distraction. Apparently, including all those abbreviations is supposed to make reading the citation "easier" under the assumption that, previously, it wasn't immediately obvious to people who cite texts for a living which numbers indicates the volume, issue, or page numbers. Now, when I was a kid . . .


**okay, technically, APA doesn't use the "vol." and "no." stuff, but I'm making a point here, so hush.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distin
Read more

A Look at Charles R. Saunders and "Sword & Soul"

Image
So, I've been reading lately about Charles R. Saunders, the black author of sword-and-sorcery fiction, and man .... poor guy. If there's been ever a case of someone being born about 30 years too soon, it's Saunders. Usually, when people mention about black S&S authors, they mean Samuel R. Delany. This makes sense. As a queer, Marxist deconstructionist, Delany established his street cred first by writing SF before wading into the "gutters" (ahem) of S&S fantasy. (Sidenote: are there any black fantasy writers except maybe Jemisin who didn't first establish their street cred by writing SF?). Although I personally never much cared for Delany's  writing style or Nevèrÿon books , which are basically what happens when someone who holds a subgenre in contempt decides to write in that subgenre, it is true that academic critics love Delany .... especially critics who hate S&S themselves. So if they mention Saunders at all, which is rare, it's usuall
Read more

A Good Week For Publication

So, wow. The Journal of Tolkien Research has just published my article, " Harken Not to Wild Beasts: Between Rage and Eloquence in Saruman and Thrasymachus ." What astounds me is that I finished the piece only two weeks ago and already got back the peer reviews. Of course, no real reason WHY the review process has to take months, but it just usually does. Kudos to the anonymous reviewers, great praise upon them, for working so quickly. I might even more appreciative of their promptness than of their kind remarks; I barely had to do any revisions to the article. The process went so fast, in fact, that the publication barely feels real. One of the great advantages of an online open-access journal, too, is instantaneous publication. As I'm learning with the several other articles I have in circulation, the publication process generally takes even longer than the review process. Anyway, this has been a good week. I finished my review of Harry Potter essays, and the edito
Read more